A Little Girl Lost

Have you ever heard or said, “I’m a sinner saved by grace.” I know I’ve said it and read it on bumper stickers.

In my reading this week, this identification was challenged. Are we really sinners first?

Are you a sinner? Is that the way the world sees you?

I know a man who worked in a factory alongside the same co-worker for twenty years. While on break one day this man pulled out his Sunday school lesson. His co-worker saw this and said, “I didn’t know you were a Christian.”

God cannot look upon sin. Remember that moment on the cross when Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) If God could not look at his only begotten Son who took on the sins of the world, how could he look at us as “sinners saved by grace?”

Once we were sinners. Sinner’s sin. (Habakkuk 1:13).

But we were saved once for all by the blood of Jesus when we accepted him as our Lord and Savior. (Hebrews 5:9) That salvation gave us a new name.

Saints. Holy people. (1 Corinthians 1:2).

God wants us to live out our salvation as saints who sin. In his grace, we spread the gospel of Jesus Christ in this sin-filled world by our words and actions.

“But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me (1 Corinthians 15:10).